| | This is a cool topic. My son is turning 6 in December.
I think there is a really interesting balance between simply creating a safe place for him to learn to regulate himself and learn to implement the values of our family and culture, and planting little dharma seeds. In some cases these things really dovetail: like impermanence and the equation clinging=suffering are pretty easy for a kid to grasp, in practice, and appreciate the significance of in terms of being happy and kind. Your example with the plastic toy and song is great and i think just being able to sow a seed with a little phrase like that is an excellent way to do it.
No-self IS more difficult in this context as at this stage of development I think it's really important for kids to develop a stable sense of being someone. So how to let that happen in a more porous, flexible way is an interesting question.
That said, I also think that individuals are born geared to having very different styles of identification. For instance, I've always felt my identity as more of a complex of partially overlapping situational identities and I've always had a sense of how my actual being exceeds my identities. Some folks have a much more solid stable identity from the get go, and my son appears more like this. He's very hard-headed whereas I am more dreamy. He's very physically handy and can allready provide actual help with little tasks around the house and I'm pretty bad at handy household things by nature. He's attracted to sports and I never was. All these differences in ways of being mean that I simply don't know what's the 'best' way to raise him to be a healthy, reasonably happy adult much less be his dharma teacher (which is a role I don't take with anyone else, either, anyway!). So for me there are obviously plenty of lessons as well in terms of adjusting expectations and providing a space for him to develop in his own way rather than trying to direct his development.
So ultimately I think I look at it more in terms of giving him a sort of baseline of internal skills around being aware of his own states, being responsible for how he acts those states out, but basically being OK with whatever feelings are coming up and learning that feelings, impulses, etc. don't have to automatically be translated into action. I think this plants seeds of seeing that "I am not (limited to...) whatever is coming up at the moment". There is an interesting parallel between the psychoanalytic concept of 'ego strength' and the Buddhist concept of 'mindfulness' in that ego strength simply means the ability to non-reactively be aware of one's own feelings, thoughts etc in real time without defensiveness.
So I think rather than trying to teach him insight practice or principles for me it's simply about raising (reasonably) healthy happy kids with good ego strength. This will naturally lay foundations that will be optimal for them if they later choose to pursue insight (such as a stable mind with low reactivity, good ability for delayed gratification, self-awareness without excessive self-judgement, a sense of the difference between co-dependance, a fantasy of hyperindendence, and the actuality of interdependence, etc.). |